Portfolio item

IEEE-IST EMBS Motivational Weekend

Location: Sesimbra

Date: March 10th to 12th, 2017

Organization: IEEE-IST EMB Student Chapter

Number of participants: 8

Name of event: Motivational Weekend EMBS 17’

In the recent months, EMBS has grown significantly and with that immense growth, some communicational and organizational problems have arisen (mainly within the coordination level). Furthermore, the new semester was fast approaching and there was a need to plan certain vital activities including the search for new people for the team. Since the team mostly works via Slack and the meetings are majorly via Zoom, there was also a need to resolve the issues mentioned before face-to-face and to do some team-building activities, so the team didn’t feel so “detached”. Hence, the board concluded that the best thing for EMBS-IST at that time was to have a Motivational Weekend.

With that being said, a house in central Sesimbra was rented via Airbnb and, upon arrival, 3 teams (2-3 elements) were made. This teams were chosen not based on pre-existing relationships, but on people in EMBS who hadn’t really worked together before or had existing issues they had to settle. Each team would either set the table, make dinner or do the dishes on every meal.

On the second day , Saturday, each person would randomly choose someone else’s name and would have to apply the Sandwich technique: they would have to give two compliments and one (constructive) critique to whoever they’d picked. Additionally, if anyone else had any critiques (or compliments) they might want to add, they were free to do so.

This “session” proved most useful because it allowed everyone to openly discuss the work they’ve done and received honest feedback and aspects they could work on. After lunch and until right before dinner, the team talked about the future of EMBS, made some decisions for the next few months and worked on their ongoing projects in the organization.

After dinner , the participants were divided between two teams (using the same criteria as

before) and they played a took turns answering questions about 20 different topics in order to win points and become the winning team.

On the final day, a Sunday, the team continued the work they started the previous day up until lunch. After lunch, the whole house had to be cleaned and organized and had to be empty by 16h o’clock.

Overall, the Motivational Weekend went really well and it is definitely an experience to repeat. It helped everyone improve their work method, set goals for EMBS for the next semester and it contributed substantially for team-building purposes.